I believe that everyone deserves a fighting chance to pursue their dream. The playing field is not level, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can design ecosystems to nurture innovators, entrepreneurs, and dreamers. We can accelerate innovation at scale, across companies, communities, and countries.

I'm a venture investor and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. My company, T2 Venture Creation, is a unique innovation design firm. We make innovation at scale. We do this by creating entire ecosystems, what we call Rainforests. In other words, we do for ecosystems what incubators and accelerators do for startups.

Atlanta's New Startup Hub Is A Rainforest, Literally

Some lucky authors get their books turned into movies. Others get television series. Or maybe amusement rides.

Me? My book is being turned into an entire building. That’s right, 304 pages of text transformed into 103,000 gleaming square feet of awesomeness.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool.

How did this happen? Earlier this year, Johnson Cook reached out to me over Twitter. He explained that my book, The Rainforest, had inspired the way he was designing his startup hub, Atlanta Tech Village. The book provided him a useful framework on how innovative ecosystems thrive, how startup communities excel. So Johnson decided to become the “Chief Rainforest Evangelist” (his phrase) in Atlanta. He wanted to apply the Rainforest model as a roadmap for growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

That’s where most people would be satisfied. A few weeks later, however, Johnson came back to me again. This time, he wrote: “I have a new idea… a big idea.” He said he wanted to design the entire Atlanta Tech Village like a real rainforest. A physical one. He sent me sketches. It had trees and canopies and undergrowth. It blew me away.

Johnson Cook is doing amazing work, and I thought it would be interesting to share some of his thinking behind how he is building a startup hub in Atlanta. Here’s a little Q&A we put together for you:

Q: You’re in the process of converting the Rainforest concept into physical space – a space whose very nature and design will foster innovation. Why did you decide to do that? How do you approach the task differently from a standard coworking space?

Johnson: Back in January 2013, the Atlanta Tech Village was a vision in our heads and a blank canvas in every respect: a five story office building, 80′s design characteristics, and the energy and charm of a somewhere you would go to meet with your lawyer to talk about taxes. We were starting from scratch in every area of our vision. We needed to create a framework for helping tech startups get off the ground, we needed a programmatic flow for 103,000 square feet, we needed design inspiration, and we wanted it to all fit together nicely. My friend Scott Henderson at another Atlanta startup hub (Hypepotamus), recommended the Rainforest book to me and I immediately picked it up. As I read the book, I realized that it was providing both a philosophical and a practical handbook to accomplishing our vision.

Core Values. First and foremost, the core values we live by in the Atlanta Tech Village are very much in line with the Rainforest concept about community and openness. They are: Be Nice. Dream Big. Work Hard Play Hard. Pay it Forward. We display these throughout the building, as well as on lanyards for keycards. Even our wifi passwords are varying combinations of core values so we are constantly reminded and reminding of their importance. Everyone in the community shares these values and understands that we must work together for our own individual success.

Q: Can you describe what each level of your Rainforest will look like? How will each level help to serve different steps in the start-up process?

Johnson: Stratification of Startup Progress. The Atlanta Tech Village building is five stories plus a basement level. First, we’re using the physical layers of a rainforest for inspiration in many ways. The basement level is the equivalent of the root system. We have a small data center (mostly for show and dev servers– as all of our startups leverage the cloud), we have an exercise facility (keep the fundamentals of your startup healthy: your body), and a large video production studio. The first level is the forest floor, or main level. This is mostly open to the public with a large event center (complete with 400 seat auditorium and high end audio visual), startup community center (with shared kitchen, keg, coffee, and more), and a local coffee shop + bar that is open to the public.

The second floor is the understory layer and consists of 2 to 4 person offices. Once a startup has accelerated to the point where they need their own quiet space, they move up in the building from first floor open coworking to second floor private office.

After the understory layer, companies that succeed will expand into the canopy layers. These are floors 3-5 and are designed with 6- to 25- person modular suites. The suites can all be connected to together similarly to adjoining hotel rooms, so that we can offer flexible space with lots of variety without ever bringing in contractors for construction. Startups change (both expand and contract) rapidly and we need a building that can meet that unique requirement.

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